© Kandasamy M | Dreamstime.com

First day back at work after a bereavement leave, and we’re still not ready for the world of blogging.

Nevertheless, we’re all about doing the right thing here at Left-Handed Complement, and in that spirit we’re recycling some of our favorite electrons. And with over 470 fresh daily posts in the past 16+ months, there’s lots to choose from.

I hereby stop apologizing for resuming our observance of the prime directive of blogging: Thou Shalt Blog Daily!

And I’m guessing that most of you weren’t here nine months ago. As one of my favorite paper publications used to say as they flogged unsold back issues: “If you haven’t read it yet, it’s new for you!”

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

Originally posted November 16, 2007, titled “mm195: Edison gets the glory — Tesla won the war.”

MUDGE’S Musings

Every schoolchild, at least of MUDGE‘s generation, knew the name of Thomas Edison, America’s genius inventor. Not nearly so well known today is the reputation of Nikola Tesla, whose alternating current technology offered stiff competition to Edison’s direct current at the time when the nascent electric utilities were battling for the privilege of revolutionizing civilization.

That first battle ground, New York City, finally just yesterday, November 14 2007, after 125 years of service, converted the last direct current electricity service to alternating current.

Can you imagine any industrial artifact built today still being around in the year 2132, 125 years from now? We just don’t think that way any more. Ask the survivors and grieving families of those lost when the I-35 bridge at Minneapolis collapsed this past summer, at the youthful age of 40.

Back to New York:

By Jennifer 8. Lee

Con Edison’s original power plant on Pearl Street. (Illustration: Consolidated Edison)

Today, Con Edison will end 125 years of direct current electricity service that began when Thomas Edison opened his Pearl Street power station on Sept. 4, 1882. Con Ed will now only provide alternating current, in a final, vestigial triumph by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, Mr. Edison’s rivals who were the main proponents of alternating current in the AC/DC debates of the turn of the 20th century.

New York, more than most of our old Atlantic coastline cities, is this mesmerizing blend of the state of the art and trendy, and the downright obsolete. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that direct current is still in use in pockets of the city — not economically viable to install new today (or even 80 years ago!), but installations like the one retired yesterday weren’t broken, so weren’t fixed.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Off Goes the Power Current Started by Thomas Edison – City Room – Metro – New York Times Blog

The really fascinating part of the story, beyond the implications noted above of industrial artifacts usefully lasting 95 years beyond a conservative depreciation schedule, is the mention of Tesla. The story actually links to this Wikipedia article, worthy of one’s attention.

What was it about the 19th Century that spawned so many giants? That by itself is the subject of a Ph.D. dissertation, so you’re not likely to find the answer in this space! But Nikola Tesla was undoubtedly one of those giants, a scientist and inventor who

… contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio.

What an amazing man, setting a very high bar for future men of science, practical inventors and eccentric personalities.

I hope that future school children will learn his name — perhaps the new electric car named, one guesses, to commemorate his amazing contributions to the science and engineering of electricity, will help.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

© Carbouval | Dreamstime.com

So it’s been pretty tough this week, as Faithful Reader might imagine, and we’re dipping our toes gingerly back into the blogging sea tonight.

Nevertheless, we’re all about doing the right thing here at Left-Handed Complement, and in that spirit we’re recycling some of yr (justifiably) humble svt‘s favorite electrons. And, with nearly 470 fresh daily posts in the past 16+ months, the recycling process has an exceptionally rich vein to mine.

I hereby stop apologizing for resuming our observance of the prime directive of blogging: Thou Shalt Blog Daily!

And, I’m guessing that most of you weren’t here nine months ago. As one of my favorite paper publications used to say as they flogged unsold back issues: “If you haven’t read it yet, it’s new for you!”

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From last fall, originally posted November 13, 2007, and with a woman vice presidential candidate, more germane than ever, titled “mm193: Fuel without oil, or corn.”

MUDGE’S Musings

It’s been an ongoing theme (here, here and here) at Left-Handed Complement: the pandering, wrong-headed concentration on corn derived ethanol as the U.S. main alternative to Saudi (and Nigerian, Gulf of Mexico and North Slope) petroleum to fuel our transportation system.

This past weekend, the NYTimes featured a fascinating look at non-corn alternatives to powering our SUVs.

For years, scientists have known that the building blocks in plant matter — not just corn kernels, but also corn stalks, wood chips, straw and even some household garbage — constituted an immense potential resource that could, in theory, help fill the gasoline tanks of America’s cars and trucks.

Mostly, they have focused on biology as a way to do it, tinkering with bacteria or fungi that could digest the plant material, known as biomass, and extract sugar that could be fermented into ethanol. But now, nipping at the heels of various companies using biological methods, is a new group of entrepreneurs, including Mr. Mandich, who favor chemistry.

The conceptual problem with ethanol from corn has always rested in the strong suspicion that the energy required to process corn to burn in one’s automobile exceeds the yield of energy so created.

Ethanol from corn is a political hot button, especially for all of the presidential campaigners prostrating themselves before Iowa’s farmers — isn’t it high time to divest this country from its inappropriate emphasis on Iowa and New Hampshire in the primary process?

You don’t see Georgia influencing election trends, and yet:

In Georgia alone, enough waste wood is available to make two billion gallons of ethanol a year, Mr. Mandich said. If all that material could be captured and converted to fuel, it could replace about 1 percent of the nation’s gasoline consumption.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Fuel Without the Fossil – New York Times

Obviously, there are some very bright people working hard at solutions, made increasingly economically attractive as the baseline of comparison to petroleum-based fuels persists in climbing inexorably toward $4/gallon.

And, corn-based or not, it looks like ethanol is going to be the end result of all of this chemical creativity, since it’s ethanol that has the Congressionally mandated tax credit.

MUDGE used to believe that the fuel cell guys had the answer, but what with the way the real world works, I can’t see corner hydrogen pumps popping up in many neighborhoods in my lifetime. So chemically derived ethanol will have to do.

Good to see U.S. innovation persists. Like the current IBM advertisements proclaim, it’s easy to say, and so very much more difficult to actually do.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

© Carbouval | Dreamstime.com

MUDGE’S Musings

Events, continue to conspire, making it unacceptably late to start a fresh project, but hey, recycling is IN, right? We’re all about doing the right thing here at Left-Handed Complement, and in that spirit we’re recycling some of yr (justifiably) humble svt‘s favorite electrons.

I hereby stop apologizing for observing the prime directive of blogging: Thou Shalt Blog Daily!

And, I’m guessing that most of you weren’t here nine months ago. As one of my favorite paper publications used to say as they flogged unsold back issues: “If you haven’t read it yet, it’s new for you!”

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From last fall, and always in season, especially since it’s back to school time for millions, originally posted November 2, 2007, and titled “mm183: Abolish the Air Force.”

MUDGE’S Musings

From the “If it’s the weekend, it must be military” department, we bring you this fascinating analysis from The American Prospect.

Was sent this earlier today by MUDGE‘s ex-Navy son, who was interested, as is his parent, not due to his parochial leanings toward the maritime forces, but rather due to his interest in history, especially military history.

And the thesis here is based, not only on the present straitened circumstances in which the U.S. Air Force finds itself, fighting in conflicts using techniques in which it has little interest, and causing as a result inexcusable amounts of what is delicately called collateral damage.

No, the analysis expertly recounts the troubled history of the Air Force, built from the first on a flawed premise: the value of strategic bombing.

Abolish the Air Force

What it does on its own — strategic bombing — isn’t suited to modern warfare. What it does well — its tactical support missions — could be better managed by the Army and Navy. It’s time to break up the Air Force.

Robert Farley | November 1, 2007

In August of this year, reports emerged that British Army officers in Afghanistan had requested an end to American airstrikes in Helmand Province because the strikes were killing too many civilians there. In Iraq, the Lancet Study of Iraqi civilian casualties of the war suggested that airstrikes have been responsible for roughly 13 percent of those casualties, or somewhere in the range of 50,000 to 100,000 deaths.

This watershed comes at a particularly important time, as the Air Force observed its 60th anniversary this past September.

But it’s time to revisit the 1947 decision to separate the Air Force from the Army. While everyone agrees that the United States military requires air capability, it’s less obvious that we need a bureaucratic entity called the United States Air Force. The independent Air Force privileges airpower to a degree unsupported by the historical record. This bureaucratic structure has proven to be a continual problem in war fighting, in procurement, and in estimates of the costs of armed conflict. Indeed, it would be wrong to say that the USAF is an idea whose time has passed. Rather, it’s a mistake that never should have been made.

As a child of the 50s and 60s MUDGE cut his teeth on Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, which ought to be required reading for all (and which I believe helped make draft dodgers out of huge swathes of the sons of the Greatest Generation, whose Air Force Heller eviscerates).

So I’ve long been suspicious of the value of strategic bombing, which was designed to undermine the enemy’s ability to prosecute war by crippling its industrial base, and as the years have passed, and my reading of history has expanded well beyond the comic novel, my suspicions have become sureties.

Before we continue, I need to stop.

What is written here is meant to cast no aspersions on the competence, courage and loyalty of the personnel in the cockpits and the equally dedicated people who support them on the ground. Indeed the official nephew of Mr. and Mrs. MUDGE is completing his senior year at a major university as a high performing member of Air Force ROTC and we couldn’t be prouder.

This is about the generals and the politicians who coddle them. Strategic and not tactical. I love you gals and guys in the trenches, and the shiny (or anti-reflective stealthy as the case may be) warbirds you fly and you keep in the air. This is only about those who direct you from the air conditioned D.C. offices. Those guys.

Okay, back to the story.

During the first years of the U.S. involvement in the European theater of World War II, strategic bombing was the only way for the U.S. to take the fight to Germany, but was a terribly costly way, and did not provide the overwhelming blow that its then Army Air Force proponents promised.

But, strategic bombing is what the Air Force was selling, and just after the successful end of the war Congress bought it.

Strategic bombing performed by the now independent Air Force did lots of work, but failed to win the wars against North Korea, or North Vietnam.

Arguably, airpower did succeed on its own in bringing victory in the 1999 Kosovo War. For 78 days, the NATO alliance bombed Serbian military and infrastructure targets in order to force Serbia’s withdrawal from the province of Kosovo. After increasingly serious threats of a ground invasion and the end of Russian support, Serbia succumbed to the NATO occupation of Kosovo. Even acknowledging the decisiveness of the airstrikes, however, the ability of a small country to stand against the world’s most powerful military alliance for almost three months does not speak well of the coercive capacity of modern airpower.

And now, strategic bombing seems to have an uncertain place in the type of asymmetric warfare the U.S. is fighting today.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Abolish the Air Force | The American Prospect

There has been something “off” about the Air Force, especially in recent years. The scandals at the Air Force Academy, which as one of the comments to the American Prospect story reminds us, is increasingly fundamentalist Christian in its orientation (anyone recall separation of church and state?) and where sexual harassment (an unfortunate and nasty feature at all of the military academies) has been particularly ugly.

Another aside: During the years the official son of Mr. and Mrs. MUDGE was a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, we were proud members of the local parents organization, so we were in a better position than most to understand the very much harder than hard road that women midshipmen and cadets face at all of the Academies. And now one of those stalwart women, who went on to distinguished service in Japan, the Gulf and Washington, D.C., is now our lovely daughter-in-law. Are we lucky!

A third aside: I remember distinctly learning from a Naval Academy recruiter at one of those parents association meetings in the early 1990s that at the time, due to the post Cold War drawdowns of forces, there were actually more flight berths on offer to graduates of the Naval Academy (remember, all those floating airports, the Navy’s carriers) than for the Air Force.

Off.

Finally, as covered in several posts here recently, the air is increasingly filling with remotely piloted aircraft, the UAVs and UCAVs, most of them flown by enlisted personnel at consoles thousands of miles away. Not exactly Eddie Rickenbacker or Chuck Yeager, is it?

Did you catch the heart of the argument?

If strategic bombing won independence for the Air Force, yet strategic bombing cannot win wars, it’s unclear why the Air Force should retain its independence.

Indeed.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Note!: the link to Amazon.com used above is for the convenience of faithful reader and represents no commercial relationship whatsoever. Left-Handed Complement should be so fortunate as to ever collect remuneration of any kind for this endeavor. I can link, so I link. It’s technology. It’s cool. Deal with it.

So, back into the archives yet again.

I console myself by guessing that most of you weren’t here nine months ago. As one of my favorite paper publications used to say: “If you haven’t read it yet, it’s new for you!”

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From last fall, and always in season, originally posted October 17, 2007, and originally titled “mm172: Diabetes: Not so Simple, Simon! (And stay away from that pie!).”

MUDGE’S Musings

Continuing our medical mini-series, this story was among the NYTimes’ most emailed yesterday.

Type II, adult onset diabetes is the focus of the piece, delving in great detail into recent research that is raising more questions than answers.

It’s a lengthy article, but well written, and well worth your time.

MUDGE’S Musings

Continuing our medical mini-series, this story was among the NYTimes’ most emailed yesterday.

Type II, adult onset diabetes is the focus of the piece, delving in great detail into recent research that is raising more questions than answers.

It’s a lengthy article, but well written, and well worth your time.

By AMANDA SCHAFFER

An explosion of new research is vastly changing scientists’ understanding of diabetes and giving new clues about how to attack it.

The fifth leading killer of Americans, with 73,000 deaths a year, diabetes is a disease in which the body’s failure to regulate glucose, or blood sugar, can lead to serious and even fatal complications. Until very recently, the regulation of glucose — how much sugar is present in a person’s blood, how much is taken up by cells for fuel, and how much is released from energy stores — was regarded as a conversation between a few key players: the pancreas, the liver, muscle and fat.

Now, however, the party is proving to be much louder and more complex than anyone had shown before.

So, the usual suspects, pancreas, liver, muscle and fat have been joined by new candidates: a hormone produced by bone, osteocalcin; inflammation in the immune system; the brain; and the gut.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

In Diabetes, a Complex of Causes – New York Times

We rail in this country against the high cost of health care. We are outraged by the prices we pay for pharmaceuticals.

But people, there’s wonderful work being done to discover how the human system works, and how to repair it when it is impaired. This diabetes research is a perfect example.

Of course it’s partially financed by the big drug manufacturers. Be glad it is — where else would the big money come from? The government? A useful source of research funding, but always constrained.

You’ve heard this before. These days, the cost of bringing a drug to market is measured in $100s of millions (probably a cool $billion by now), and bunches of years (as many as 15!).

When that 1:10,000 long shot hits, drug companies have a very short patent life to receive top dollar for their intellectual property, which by the way is alleviating pain, curing disease, improving life for patients around the world, while providing the wherewithal for research and testing of the next great breakthrough.

When viewed that way, the high cost of medicine in this country doesn’t seem so extreme.

Yes, the insurance driven system at the patient level is broken, a subject for another day.

But, as a person who has been living with Type II diabetes for over a decade, and whose sister’s partner’s juvenile diabetes is rapidly killing her, MUDGE has a personal stake in successful diabetes research, and by extension, all the useful medical research in this country, however it’s funded.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

© Ron Chapple Studios | Dreamstime.com

Web Conferencing Week

So, if this were really a weekly feature, we’d be on number 052 or something, and this is only number 14. Thus, why not two in a row?

The poor sap fallen asleep over his laptop in front of his desktop PC in the illustration doesn’t resemble yr (justifiably) humble svt in the slightest, but it’s what I’ll look like in a few hours.

No, I won’t suddenly get 35 years younger, grow back a lot of very dark hair and become vaguely Asian.

But, I’m working very late tonight, and very early in the morning. Sigh.

As I’ve often noted in this space, I support the enterprise web conferencing application from an end-user perspective. A vendor once described me most flatteringly as the manager of the end user experience for my technology.

So, in addition to working with the other, more technical, members of the team (server administrators and system architects); developing curriculum and reference materials; teaching nearly 4,000 fellow employees in the past six years to use web conferences  by attending my training web conferences; besides all that, I’m the guy who gets the call when users have critical conferences that require my professional expertise.

Got the call a few weeks ago: we’re doing an important meeting three times, because the sun never sets on our global enterprise: once for the Asia-Pacific region, once for Europe and once for the Western Hemisphere. 8amCEST, 1pmCEST, 6pmCEST. We’ve had trouble with the web conferencing tool in the past, please help.

I endeavor to honor requests like this. But, of course, I’m sitting in the U.S. Central time zone.

8amCEST (Central European Summer Time) in, yes, central Europe, the origin of the meetings, translates to 1amCDT (U.S. Central Daylight Time).

1pmCEST is 6amCDT.

6pmCEST will be the only reasonably convenient (to this U.S. based employee) session, 11amCDT.

Tonight, or rather, early tomorrow morning, is the night.

So, and this is after a typical workday that began at 7:20am this morning in our Northern Illinois office, shortly I’ll set up my laptop, verify a good VPN connection to the network, test the server and then wait it out until 1am, a little more than three hours away as I write this. Got my cell phone (loud) alarm set for 12:45am just in case the above photo is destiny.

Then, after the first session, I’ll head to bed for my beauty sleep (never worked before, but there’s always hope), dreaming peacefully for the long, quiet hours until the alarm goes off at its usual 5:10am (maybe three hours if I’m fortunate).

Hopping out of bed, I’ll have time to shower and dress and be ready for the 6am session; thence to the office for the odd team meeting and the 11am session. And in the U.S. afternoon, I’ll be assisting another group with their four-hour session, this time in person, in a large conference space.

And can I take the next day off, in compensation? No such good fortune, as I have a commitment to assist yet another team with their critical meeting, again, in person.

What is ironic about all this is I am a champion night owl. Lots of nights, admittedly weekend nights, where the opportunity, if not the reality, exists for sleeping in, I’ll still be reasonably wide awake at midnight, 1am, and later. Tonight though, I HAVE to be awake at 1am. Not nearly any fun at all!

I am not complaining about all this, because I really love my job (in these parlous times EVERYBODY who has a job MUST love it!); no, really I do.

But, where else can I vent, except to you, faithful reader.

So, thanks for providing me the opportunity to pull aside the curtain, when most people pay no attention. After all, I haven’t had to support a conference in the middle of the night since last October. A couple of times a year is no big deal.

Yawn.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

A lazy summer Friday. Yeah, it was a workday, one that ran the gamut between frantically sweatier than necessary (a 90-degree/90% humidity day in Northern Illinois), and Procrastination Central.

Got home, shut my eyes for a few minutes (my always tough 65 minute commute seemed tougher than usual), went off with Mrs. MUDGE to semi-fast food, Costco, ExxonMobil (gah!), and Blockbuster. Watched a recorded PVR episode of what once was a favorite guilty pleasure, “The Next Food Network Star” that has become a pale shadow of its former toothy, flavorful goodness.

By the time it became blogging hour, Friday had passed its 1,320th minute, and whatever energy that remains has been confined to cutting and pasting.

New tomorrow, promise! But, this one is a good one. And as I reminded one of my favorite bloggers, Roxy at Roxiticus Desperate Housewives, earlier this week, any post you haven’t read before is new!

There’s most read, and then there’s favorite. This is a post which yr (justifiably) humble svt is, regrettably, but not regretfully, not at all humble about.

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From last summer, originally posted October 6, 2007, and originally titled “mm163: V-22 Osprey: A Flying Shame,” the third in an occasional series in this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere©, comprising 10 parts thus far, called “The changing face of military aviation.”

The series so far…

MUDGE’S Musings

The changing face of military aviation

Third in an occasional series

As an amateur with an interest in all things aviation, history, technology, and the history of technology, we have followed the Osprey tilt-rotor story with interest and concern for close to 20 years.

Last week, Time magazine eviscerated Osprey, and the ugly industrial-governmental tango that has nursed it from an uncertain birth, a troubled childhood and adolescence into a deadly maturity. And, unfortunately, we don’t mean deadly to an enemy, as Osprey is essentially toothless, and seems mainly dangerous to its hapless crew and passengers.

The U.S. Marine Corps’ goal for the Osprey program has been to harness the flexibility and maneuverability of a helicopter with the straight-ahead point to point cruising speed of a fixed wing aircraft. Nothing wrong with such a goal, in theory.

But when converting theory to realty, execution is everything, and the Osprey has been an ugly example of poor execution in most every way possible during its lifetime, which began during the Reagan administration!

Even in this day of long lead time military programs (due more to Congressional restraints over outrageous costs than technological challenges, although there are always those aplenty), the fact that Osprey is just now, after more than 20 years, taking its place on the front lines, and with many questions still open regarding its utility and reliability, is astonishing.

The “lay” public has only been conscious of the Osprey when it burst onto Headline News via its many fatal crashes during its lengthy run up to service. Time did us a service by more completely detailing its story.

by MARK THOMPSON

A V-22 flies over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Carolina. Ted Carlson / Check Six

It’s hard to imagine an American weapons program so fraught with problems that Dick Cheney would try repeatedly to cancel it — hard, that is, until you get to know the Osprey. As Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush, Cheney tried four times to kill the Marine Corps’s ungainly tilt-rotor aircraft. Four times he failed. Cheney found the arguments for the combat troop carrier unpersuasive and its problems irredeemable. “Given the risk we face from a military standpoint, given the areas where we think the priorities ought to be, the V-22 is not at the top of the list,” he told a Senate committee in 1989. “It came out at the bottom of the list, and for that reason, I decided to terminate it.” But the Osprey proved impossible to kill, thanks to lawmakers who rescued it from Cheney’s ax time and again because of the home-district money that came with it — and to the irresistible notion that American engineers had found a way to improve on another great aviation breakthrough, the helicopter.

Flight Risk for the V-22 Osprey

Now the aircraft that flies like an airplane but takes off and lands like a chopper is about to make its combat debut in Iraq. It has been a long, strange trip: the V-22 has been 25 years in development, more than twice as long as the Apollo program that put men on the moon. V-22 crashes have claimed the lives of 30 men — 10 times the lunar program’s toll — all before the plane has seen combat. The Pentagon has put $20 billion into the Osprey and expects to spend an additional $35 billion before the program is finished. In exchange, the Marines, Navy and Air Force will get 458 aircraft, averaging $119 million per copy.

In this extended cover story, Time takes the time to illustrate some larger truths about how our government works, or not:

The saga of the V-22 — the battles over its future on Capitol Hill, a performance record that is spotty at best, a long, determined quest by the Marines to get what they wanted — demonstrates how Washington works (or, rather, doesn’t). It exposes the compromises that are made when narrow interests collide with common sense. It is a tale that shows how the system fails at its most significant task, by placing in jeopardy those we count on to protect us.

As with any hybrid, Osprey can be both helicopter and fixed wing aircraft, but of course much is compromised in the mix. It’s not a good helicopter (read the Time story about Osprey’s autorotation challenge, and gasp) and for a combat aircraft it’s criminally under-armed.

Osprey was supposed to be equipped with a .50 caliber three-barreled machine gun in its nose, so it could protect its landing zone with a hail of heavy bullets.

But the added weight (1,000 lbs., or 450 kg) and cost ($1.5 million per V-22) ultimately pushed the gun into the indefinite future. … So 10 V-22s are going to war this month, each with just a lone, small 7.62-mm machine gun mounted on its rear ramp. The gun’s rounds are about the same size as a .30-06 hunting rifle’s, and it is capable of firing only where the V-22 has been — not where it’s going — and only when the ramp used by Marines to get on and off the aircraft is lowered.

Read on:

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

V-22 Osprey: A Flying Shame – TIME

I fear for the Marines as Osprey deploys to the dusty deserts of wartime Iraq. There’s fearless courage (a Marine specialty), but deploying the V-22 into this already futile war seems like a brand new tragedy in the making.

A cliché first coined during my childhood once again proves why it’s so often used:

In many ways, the V-22 is a classic example of how large weapons systems have been built in the U.S. since Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 of the “unwarranted influence” of “the military-industrial complex.”

I hope stories like this one in a widely read general interest publication help daylight other high-cost military programs: F-22 Raptor (is it really stealthy at all?); F-35 Lightning II –the Joint Strike Fighter — (how does light and less expensive  equal more capable, exactly?) to name just two.

It would be tragic to wait 20 years to learn the ugly secrets about them.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

There’s most read, and then there’s favorite. This is a post which yr (justifiably) humble svt is, regrettably, but not regretfully, not at all humble about.

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From last summer, originally posted September 15, 2007, and originally titled “U.S. Pilot helped clear the fog of war”.

MUDGE’S Musings

Got to tell you, like most of us, I have long since developed war fatigue. And I’m nowhere near the front. All I seem to be able to do is wring my hands and whimper, “Get our soldiers out of this!”

But, I have a soft spot for technology, and this is a technology story, about Iraq. But of course, wars are fought by women and men. And this is even more a story about a creative and determined man who took on as his mission to sell a particular technology to the command structure.

So we’ll take a look.

Greg Harbin saw a way to streamline airstrikes. The solution — and his cause — was the Rover, a device that would one day save his life.

By Julian E. Barnes
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 13, 2007

In the summer of 2003, an Air Force pilot named Greg Harbin was doing desk duty at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

Day in and day out, Harbin sat in front of five computer screens, scanning photographs and video sent by unmanned planes flying 1,200 miles away, over Iraq and Afghanistan.

His job was to take that information, along with reports from ground troops, and identify fresh targets — Taliban fighters or Iraqi insurgents.

But one thing puzzled him.

When regular units called for an attack by a Predator drone, the request went to Harbin, and then, if approved by a general, to “pilots” in Nevada, who fired the missile by remote control. The process often took as long as 45 minutes.

By contrast, special operations forces could call in attacks by unmanned Predator aircraft in less than a minute.

The difference, Harbin learned, was that a handful of special ops units were equipped with a device called the Rover, which gave them the same view as the pilots in Nevada. This greatly simplified communications.

Why don’t all American fighting units have the Rover? he asked himself. Then he put the question to his boss, Lt. Gen. Walter E. Buchanan, commander of the Air Force in the Middle East. Buchanan’s reply: Why indeed.

There’s a lot that’s intriguing about this story. The Predator UCAV, symbolic of technology (Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle) that will one day make human aircraft pilots sitting inside their aircraft an obsolete and quaint artifact of the first century of aviation.

Then there’s the Rover technology.

The Rover, or the Remote Operations Video Enhanced Receiver, was born in 2002, shortly after the Afghanistan war began.

Christopher Manuel, an Army Special Forces chief warrant officer, had long wanted ground units to see, in real time, the video footage shot by Predators. After serving in Afghanistan, he traveled to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to make his case. Engineers quickly developed a prototype of the Rover system.

Over the next year, it was used exclusively by special operations forces. Harbin’s mission to widen access to the technology began with the 82nd Airborne, the first conventional forces to use the system. His next stop was Mosul, Iraq, and the 101st Airborne Division, which happened to be his brother Eric’s unit.

And then there’s Greg Harbin’s unique story. Take a look at the complete article, along with its embedded video.

[Per L-HC's reformed process, please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Los Angeles Times: U.S. pilot helped clear the fog of war

There’s so much to like here. The Katrina angle.

The life-saving angle (his own!)

The technological evangelist angle (your humble correspondent likes to believe he maintains that role for the technology he represents in his place of employment).

“I am not the guy who invented it. I am not the guy who built it. I am not the only one who believes in it,” Harbin said. “My role was to get it out there.”

But, mainly, it’s about how one person, among millions, has used his creativity, initiative and will to make a difference. It’s Archimedes’ lever.

In the light of Harbin’s example, how much more tragic is it that, as of this writing, 3,781 soldiers have died in Iraq.

Once again, even worse than the trillions Bush has mortgaged and squandered, the human capital lost is even more irreplaceable.

Can’t get that bumper sticker out of my thoughts:

January 20, 2009

Bush’s last day

Congress, do the American people, especially its courageous women and men combatants, have to wait that long?

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Encountered this at lunch last week; it became a formidable challenge to finish (the story / the lunch: pick one!). Consider yourself warned, faithful reader, should you be snacking on some luscious sweet or casserole while perusing this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere©.

And remember, this comes not from some fringe or undocumented source, and also remember, April Fool’s day was some time ago.

Surgery Without the Slicing

Going in through existing orifices is good for patients and device makers, less so for doctors and hospitals

by Catherine Arnst | Business Week Sci Tech April 3, 2008, 5:00PM EST

On Mar. 11 Jeff Scholz, a 42-year-old former U.S. Marine, developed severe abdominal pain. It wasn’t as bad as the gunshot wound to the leg he suffered while in the service, but it kept him doubled over for most of the night. At the insistence of his fiancée, he went to the emergency room at the University of California at San Diego med center the next morning, where he learned his appendix was inflamed and had to come out. That’s how Scholz, the owner of a wholesale clothing company, ended up making medical history. He’s the first patient in the U.S. to have his appendix removed through his mouth.

Perhaps yr (justifiably) humble svt is more sensitive to this topic, as surgery is possible/probable sometime within the next few months for that pesky partially torn, incompletely healed Achilles tendon which he has been favoring via the awkward, weather exposing “fracture walker” mentioned occasionally in this space.

But, removing organic bits through one’s mouth, or perhaps, gender permitting, through one’s vagina sounds just wrong. And as BW points out, surgeons and their hospitals aren’t thrilled either, since saving patients healing and recovery time and minimizing scars is quite low on their priority lists.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Surgery Without the Slicing

The health insurance providers of the nation will have the final say on this of course. It will be an interesting tug of war: surgery that might take double the time at the surgeon’s, anesthesiologist’s, surgical nurses’s aggregated hourly rates of half-a-$zillion/hour, versus hospital stays that are half or less the time at their rates of three-quarters of a $zillion/day, or even eliminating overnight stays altogether as scarless surgery procedures are performed on outpatients.

But, while we watch the game we have two observations.

Thankfully, there will be no vagina involved, nor will my mouth be a suitable access orifice, for Achilles tendon surgery.

And, ewwwwwww!

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

In this short attention span world, it’s an extraordinary story that commands one’s S.A.S. for eight full pages. This is that extraordinary story. It’s an investment, faithful reader, for which yr (justifiably) humble svt hopes you’ll take the plunge.

We last tackled the relationship between technology and the developing world some time ago in a post worth re-savoring (well, I did!).

Nokia, the world’s leading cellphone manufacturer, intends to stay that way, and a fascinating strategy toward that end is illumined by the NYTimes Magazine this week.

Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

By SARA CORBETT | Published: April 13, 2008

… Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone’s ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There’s the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people’s loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool. Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.

Access. Not necessarily ownership. Just proximity to a cellphone positively changes a person’s economic prospects.

Whether it’s the woman selling individual calls in a village kiosk in India or Bangladesh (and the business behind that microfinance initiative now does a $billion per year in sales), or the fisherman who determines the optimum purchaser of today’s catch while approaching the harbor, the cellphone, by making connections that far outdistance those previously available by foot or oxcart, is transforming the entire globe, not just the Blackberry-Bluetooth obsessed developed portion.

Read on, please, and be inspired.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Cellphones – Third World Developing Nations -Poverty -Technology

One of the barriers to wider adoption of cellphones is battery charging, as noted in our previous post. Nokia and others are fully aware of the issue, and are experimenting with some ingenious solutions.

As we have frequently noted, technology is not just for the rich any more. Initiatives that are idealistic, such as One Laptop Per Child, or relentlessly commercial, as are Nokia’s, all seek to pull free that part of the world’s population that is trapped in poverty. The wonderful part: now it is occurring at the speed of electrons.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

Found a video that I had seen, along with zillions of others, some time ago, but it gained fresh context when connected to a recent briefing in the best magazine on the planet, The Economist.

First the video, very compelling.

Sobering and enlightening work, by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, actually a 2007 revision and update of the original which has been around for a couple of years. It suggested to me the headline for today’s post, “Don’t look back: Something may be gaining on you,” from that unique African-American U.S. ballplayer, Satchel Paige.

The above video is specially intriguing when measured against current reality, in Economist’s “Report on technology in emerging economies.”

Technology in emerging economies

Of internet cafés and power cuts

Feb 7th 2008 | From The Economist print edition

Emerging economies are better at adopting new technologies than at putting them into widespread use

WITHIN a few months China will overtake America as the country with the world’s largest number of internet users. Even when you factor in China’s size and its astonishing rate of GDP growth, this will be a remarkable achievement for what remains a poor economy. For the past three years China has also been the world’s largest exporter of information and communications technology (ICT). It already has the same number of mobile-phone users (500m) as the whole of Europe.

Okay, some numbers that help make real Fisch and McLeod’s message, that the 20th Century was the “American” century, but shift is happening.

Not quite so fast, though.

Yet this picture of emerging-market technarcadia is belied by parallel accounts of misery and incompetence. Last year ants ate the hard drive of a photographer in Thailand. Last week internet usage from Cairo to Kolkata was disrupted after something—probably an earthquake—sliced through two undersea cables. Personal computers have spread slowly in most emerging economies: three-quarters of low-income countries have fewer than 15 PCs per 1,000 people—and many of those computers are gathering dust.

The lever of change is of course technology. And technology is propagating to the developing world at a whiplash pace.

The upshot is that technology is spreading to emerging markets faster than it has ever done anywhere. The World Bank looked at how much time elapsed between the invention of something and its widespread adoption (defined as when 80% of countries that use a technology first report it; see chart 1). For 19th-century technologies the gap was long: 120 years for trains and open-hearth steel furnaces, 100 years for the telephone. For aviation and radio, invented in the early 20th century, the lag was 60 years. But for the PC and CAT scans the gap was around 20 years and for mobile phones just 16. In most countries, most technologies are available in some degree.

But it turns out that technology adoption is not uniform by any means; there is more to building out infrastructure than erecting a cellular tower.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Technology in emerging economies | Of internet cafés and power cuts | Economist.com

The analysis reminds us that progress turns on “technical inheritance.” A lovely phrase that simply means that technological development builds on previous achievements.

Sometimes the paradigm can be fractured. I recall having discussions more than 30 years ago regarding progress in what we then called the “second world,” i.e., communist Eastern Europe and Latin America. Imagine all of the copper wire and the ferocious amount of time it’s going to take to telephonically connect all of those millions of deprived people.

The cellular telephone system totally leapfrogged the need for a copper based communications infrastructure to the last mile in the second and third world.

But.

But, batteries still need to be recharged, so electricity still must be reliably delivered to that last mile, at the very least. Oops. Copper wire needed for that.

Until some genius in Shanghai or Bengaluru figures out how to broadcast the power from the cell tower along with the signal.

Next Thursday, you think?

But, a fascinating video, and an equally grounding analysis.

Who else but yr (justifiably) humble svt would think to put them together?

Okay, probably a less than humble moment actually.

Sigh.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

MUDGE’S Musings

Interest continues in the One Laptop Per Child initiative. As faithful reader recalls, this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere©‘s interest in the subject continues, also. Here’s where we’ve been:

Virginia Heffernan of NYTimes Magazine blog, The Medium, provides the following interesting take on XO.

Children’s Crusade

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN | Published: January 27, 2008

The much-anticipated XO laptop is an upbeat little instrument, the size of a Bible with a handle. It’s green, the universal color of contemporary virtue. It’s dandy.

The XO was designed, with much fanfare, for One Laptop Per Child, the marvelously hubristic organization created by the M.I.T. new-media guru Nicholas Negroponte to equip two billion children in poor countries with a means to educational salvation. In October, Negroponte presented the laptop at the Vatican to an audience of Roman Catholic schoolteachers and nuns. He stressed that his laptop would not run programs like Word, PowerPoint or Excel. When third-world kids use mainstream office software, he said, “that breaks my heart most.” Instead, he went on, “the children should be making things, they should be sharing things, they should be creating music, creating pictures, making videos, playing with mathematics, accessing the Internet.”

Heffernan’s Bible comparison was no accident. She relates Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC program to a mission: that of delivering education to the world’s 2 billion underserved children.

She writes equally colorfully about the impact of the XO on some preschool children, and on her technologically sophisticated self:

In my apartment, the sight of an electronic device that was built to last was almost jarring. My trembling, delicate, temperamental laptop suddenly seemed like a dying tropical bird, while the XO is a happy, healthy puppy. A tough puppy. The XO is said to withstand desert heat, direct sunlight, thick humidity, distressing falls, dirt, rainstorms and (I’m not kidding) assault by cats. Kate and I invited some preschool-age kids, including hers and mine, to come beat it up. They squealed and crowded in cinematically to glimpse the holy thing.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Virginia Heffernan – The Medium – Television – Internet Video – Media – New York Times

Looked and thought about the XO and OLPC quite thoroughly over the past months, as the linklist above reveals, but the fervent missionary aspect, and its realization in plastic and metal Heffernan sees, had not occurred to me. As one for whom religious missions have no part of his own background, I find it a bit disconcerting.

Nonetheless, in the words of one of the MUDGElet’s primary school educators whose name is long since lost in the mists of time:

“May the best educational experience win!”

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

It’s back! SASB©. Three recent looks at technology in today’s and tomorrow’s world.

©

Wall wart? That’s the affectionate term for those transformers that power so many of today’s electronics. And even if we turn off the computer or the printer that’s plugged into one, if we leave the transformer in the wall, it’s drawing power and wasting energy.

But there are people out there with a better mousetrap – er, wall wart.

“We’re talking about the exact same principle as replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent ones,” he said from Phoenix. “If our products were built into all consumer electronics — computers, flat-screen TVs, cellphones — we could save 800 million pounds of carbon emissions.”

Turns out that while we’ve been wringing our hands over greenhouse gases and energy wastefulness, technology has been pecking away at the issues.

In spite of ourselves, carbon emissions have only grown at half the speed of the growth of the world’s economy.

Now it’s a matter of having the will (and the capital) to apply the technology and start banking the benefits.

A Big Drop In Emissions Is Possible With Today’s Technology

By Doug Struck | Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, January 21, 2008; Page A06

… Technological societies are constantly striving to create ways of doing things more efficiently. Advances in efficiency in the past 30 years have led carbon emissions to grow only half as fast as the world’s economy, according to Robert Socolow, a Princeton University engineer. But those savings have been offset by the rise in population and consumption.

From personal observation, we know the truth of the following:

On a broader scale, the mundane trappings of our modern life are becoming more efficient. Household appliances, including the thirstiest of them, furnaces and air-conditioners, have steadily diminished their energy consumption in the past three decades. Today’s new kitchen refrigerators, for example, use 70 percent less power than those made in the 1970s.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

A Big Drop In Emissions Is Possible With Today’s Technology – washingtonpost.com

Compact fluorescent bulbs, which as it happens, are an interim technology (and I don’t know why this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere© didn’t give Philips Electronics LED lighting a story of its own!), are gradually replacing every conventional light bulb casa MUDGE, and in households nationwide. What did it take?

The government didn’t have to legislate for more efficient lighting – the marketplace did that.

Engineering the means to fit a fluorescent into the ubiquitous, decades-old incandescent bulb socket. Once over that hurdle, it was just a question of time, and Wal-Mart.

One would expect the same pattern to repeat where those dramatically improved efficient wall warts are concerned.

Creating efficient automobiles may require a more activist intervention – way overdue. But even for our personal transportation, the technology to improve efficiency and emissions may be close at hand.

©

Maintaining for the moment our focus on bright electronics, we consider rear-projection televisions, powered by digital light processors (DLP).

Betting on a Bright Future for Rear-Projection TVs

By ERIC A. TAUB | Published: January 21, 2008

PLANO, Tex. — Back in the early years of this decade, when plasma high-definition televisions cost $10,000, consumers found that buying a rear-projection TV was a more affordable way to jump into the digital era.

But with prices plummeting for liquid-crystal display and plasma TVs, the rear-projection market is quickly drying up. Sony and Philips got out of that business last month.

“The market is moving rapidly to L.C.D.,” said Todd Richardson, vice president for marketing of connected displays for Philips Consumer Lifestyle North America, a division of Royal Philips Electronics.

But Texas Instruments, the chip maker that developed the digital light processor most commonly found in most rear-projection TVs, is holding the line. It isn’t going to be easy.

Rear-projection TVs are getting thinner and brighter (just the opposite of yr (justifiably) humble svt, sorry to admit), and Texas Instruments is working on gamer friendly gimmicks like 3D to sweeten the pie.

Digital light processor technology uses up to two million microscopic tilting mirrors, all housed on a single chip, that direct light to the screen.

The technology, which was invented in 1987 by Larry Hornbeck, a T.I. engineer, has inherent advantages. Its TV sets weigh less than equivalent-size plasma displays. The sets can be frameless, increasing the size of the display that can fit into a given space. And D.L.P. sets consume less energy than plasma displays, an increasingly important factor as consumers opt for very large sets.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Betting on a Bright Future for Rear-Projection TVs – New York Times

On a related note, anyone else find those Texas Instrument DLP advertisements with that little girl (“it’s the mirrors”) just the slightest bit annoying, if not creepy?

©

Our third technological exploration takes us to the wonderful world of Tim Harford, the “underground economist” whose columns are found in Slate and, in this case, Wired.

How Email Brings You Closer to the Guy in the Next Cubicle

By Tim Harford | 01.18.08 | 6:00 PM

As a columnist (which is fancy for “journalist in jammies”), …

Savor that one… “journalist in jammies.” What we commentary bloggers aspire to, I suppose.

… I ought to personify the conventional wisdom that distance is dead: All I need to get my work done is a place to perch and a Wi-Fi signal. But if that’s true, why do I still live in London, the second-most expensive city in the world?

If distance really didn’t matter, rents in places like London, New York, Bangalore, and Shanghai would be converging with those in Hitchcock County, Nebraska (population 2,926 and falling). Yet, as far as we can tell through the noise of the real estate bust, they aren’t. Wharton real estate professor Joseph Gyourko talks instead of “superstar cities,” which have become the equivalent of luxury goods — highly coveted and ultra-expensive. If geography has died, nobody bothered to tell Hitchcock County.

Harford brings to light an astonishing paradox of our modern electronic collaborating world.

But I think the truth is more profound than either of those glib explanations: Technology makes it more fun and more profitable to live and work close to the people who matter most to your life and work. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, an expert on city economies, argues that communications technology and face-to-face interactions are complements like salt and pepper, rather than substitutes like butter and margarine. Paradoxically, your cell phone, email, and Facebook networks are making it more attractive to meet people in the flesh.

Go figure.

He points out that, even as electronic communications have grown by orders of magnitude, air travel keeps growing (despite the Transportation Security Administration’s best efforts to persuade us to stay home and nest!).

Why?

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

How Email Brings You Closer to the Guy in the Next Cubicle

What a fascinating duality: electronic communications enhancing face to face communications.

No wonder the web conferencing technology I support and evangelize for has grown, while our corporate travel expense has grown even more. Thanks, Mr. Harford, for enlightening us!

And that’s SASB© for today. Email your friends all about it, then discuss it with them over coffee.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

Stem cell research is simultaneously a neocon hot button, and one of medical science’s most promising magic bullets.

As a prototypical aging Baby Boomer, yr (justifiably) humble svt has made stem cell research a frequent topic in this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere©:

George III, our presidential protector of evangelical Christian values (and please don’t confuse him with the facts), has stifled medical research based on stem cells, on the grounds that the source of the research material was purported to be aborted fetuses.

Recently, researchers have concentrated on finding less controversial sources for stem cells. The latest breakthrough was reported in Friday’s Washington Post.

Lab Cites Stem Cell Advance

By Rick Weiss

Washington Post Staff Writer | Friday, January 11, 2008; Page A04

Scientists in Massachusetts said yesterday that they had created several colonies of human embryonic stem cells without harming the embryos from which they were derived, the latest in a series of advances that could speed development of stem-cell-based treatments for a variety of diseases.

In June, scientists in Japan and Wisconsin said they had made cells very similar to embryonic stem cells from adult skin cells, without involving embryos. But that technique so far requires the use of gene-altered viruses that contaminate the cells and limit their biomedical potential.

By contrast, the new work shows for the first time that healthy, normal embryonic stem cells can be cultivated directly from embryos without destroying them.

Of course, the Bush administration is not taking this advance at face value.

But that is not likely, said Story Landis, who heads the National Institutes of Health Stem Cell Task Force, which oversees grants for studies on the medically promising cells.

The embryos Lanza used, which were donated for research, appear not to have been damaged, Landis acknowledged. However, she said, “it is impossible to know definitively” that the embryos were not in some subtle way harmed by the experiment. And “no harm” is the basis of the Bush policy, she said.

The science in question was a technical tour de force:

“It is a technically impressive piece of work,” said Douglas A. Melton of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. “They’ve demonstrated their ability to isolate human embryonic stem cell lines without destruction of the embryos” — something few scientists thought possible just a few years ago.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Lab Cites Stem Cell Advance – washingtonpost.com

Lest we lose site of what all of the shouting is about, Wikipedia has a useful research timeline.

The possibilities for using stem cells to provide breakthrough solutions to what have been incurable, mysterious and tragic diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and diabetes are compelling. And the tragedy has been compounded by the typically ignorant, anti-science stance of the Bush administration.

When will evangelicals wake up and learn that science isn’t the opposite of religion, that the two are not mutually incompatible?

Meanwhile, January 20, 2009 (as this is written, 373 days, 6 hours, 46 minutes, 40 seconds from now) cannot get here soon enough!

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Note!: the link to Bushtimer.com used above is for clever illustration purposes only and represents no commercial relationship whatsoever. Left-Handed Complement should be so fortunate as to ever collect remuneration of any kind for this endeavor. I can link, so I link. It’s technology. It’s cool. It’s an artifact of Sequitur Service©. Deal with it.

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

One Laptop Per Child is real, and is all over the trade press. As is our wont at this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere©, here’s a review of previous posts on the topic:

News of Intel’s sudden departure from the OLPC board of directors came to our attention last week. This story, from eSchool News was forwarded by MUDGElet No. 2, the education professional in the family.

Intel quits One Laptop Per Child program

Chip maker, OLPC founder trade accusations about who is to blame

From eSchool News staff and wire service reports

OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte claims Intel undermined the group’s sales efforts even after joining its board.

It was like one of those ill-fated relationships you suspect won’t last, and on Jan. 3, it finally ended: Citing disagreements with the organization, Intel Corp. said it has abandoned the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, dealing a blow to the ambitious project that seeks to bring millions of low-cost laptops to children in developing countries.
The fallout ends a long-simmering spat that began even before the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker joined OLPC’s board in July, agreeing to contribute money and technical expertise. It also came only a few days before the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where a prototype of an OLPC-designed laptop using an Intel chip was slated to debut.

Seems like OLPC had some legitimate beefs with Intel.

A day after learning that Intel was abandoning his project over “philosophical” differences, Negroponte hit back, claiming on Jan. 4 that Intel had undermined his group’s effort to sell low-cost computers for schoolchildren in the developing world even after the chip company got a seat on the nonprofit’s board. He said Intel’s sales representatives had been disparaging OLPC and its XO machine as they pushed Intel’s sub-$300 Classmate PCs.

Negroponte said Intel even tried to undo a deal that OLPC already had sealed in Peru by citing flaws in the XO and telling government ministers “we ought to know, because we are on the board.” Such hostile comments were prohibited, Negroponte claimed, under the July peace treaty that brought Intel into the OLPC camp.

“I want to say we tried, but it was never a partnership,” Negroponte said. “There’s not one single thing in their contract or agreement that they lived up to.”

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Top News – Intel quits One Laptop Per Child program

News now comes from ZDNet blogger Dan Farber at the Consumer Electronics Show, where Nicholas Negroponte was a principal speaker.

OLPC’s Negroponte seeks truce with Intel and deal with Microsoft

Posted by Dan Farber @ 3:43 pm

During a presentation at the Consumer Electronic Show this afternoon, One Laptop Per Child’s Nicholas Negroponte didn’t address the recent rift between Intel and his organization.

Nicholas Negroponte and his baby, the OLPC

Intel recently unhooked itself from the OLPC board of directors, and Negroponte was not shy about blasting the chipmaker last week:

Despite OLPC’s best efforts to work things out with Intel and several warnings that their behavior was untenable, it is clear that Intel’s heart has never been in working collaboratively as a part of OLPC. This is well illustrated by the way in which our separation was announced single-handedly by Intel; Intel issued a statement to the press behind our backs while simultaneously asking us to work on a joint statement with them. Actions do speak louder than words in this case. As we said in the past, we view the children as a mission; Intel views them as a market.

News.com’s Michael Kanellos has some good fodder he picked up during Negroponte’s CES presentation:

What keeps this story line from being merely a pissing match among grown-ups who should know better are the stakes involved.

There’s a reason One Laptop Per Child has been so newsworthy: it’s a beacon of innovation for an industry that, Apple aside, seems to have commoditized itself into boredom.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

» OLPC’s Negroponte seeks truce with Intel and deal with Microsoft | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Finally, from the same source, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan, Dan Farber’s blogging partner there, comes a recent review of the XO-1 itself. We’ve posted a couple of these recently, and they are intriguing looks at a fascinating and world-changing tool.

Lessons learned: Two weeks with the XO laptop

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 2:03 am

Repeat after me. The XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child project is designed for kids. Why bore yourself with that mantra? If you don’t you may find yourself griping about something that wasn’t designed for you in the first place.

That’s one of the big takeaways from my two weeks with the XO (see unboxing gallery). Let’s face it–I bought the XO for me (err my daughter). Sure, she’d play with it, but dear old dad’s gadget lust–along with doing a good deed–drove the purchase.

So what did I learn?

1. It’s my daughter’s laptop. I’ve barely seen the thing since she’s been doing non-productive things like looking at herself in the Webcam and showing her one-year old sister the toy. Checking email? Silly grown up things. The XO is about the built in drawing program, the Web cam and icons my 5 year old guinea pig grasped instantly.

2. The XO is rugged. It has been dropped, tossed into a toy box and has had its shares of fluids on it–syrup, snot etcetera. I cringe, but the kids don’t.

3. It’s intuitive. Sure the XO is a laptop, but it’s really all about the software. Is it easy to navigate? How’s the interface? Can anyone pick it up? The Fedora based operating system rarely raised any questions for my daughter. She found the write program with little effort. And aside from the music program, which frankly was over her head, she found her way around easily.

So his five-year-old daughter grabbed it and hasn’t let go. That’s the entire story in a nutshell – a teaching tool that children play with. Education, in such short supply in much of the world, can become absorbed like all too scarce vitamins. Dignan identifies some issues with XO-1, but they don’t seem to be deal breakers.

Other odds and ends:

• Some folks have asked me to try out the Asus EeePC, which could be a superior device–I don’t know. Meanwhile, Christopher Dawson has a series on Intel’s Classmate, a strong rival. However, these comparisons miss the point. The (emerging) market is big enough for multiple players and it’s not clear that students need an alpha male device (my chip is faster than yours and can do office productivity!). The kids just need something that works so let’s not impose that cliche device wars storyline to the OLPC.

We’ve talked a bit about the ASUS Eee PC recently. More of a conventional product, as is the Intel Classmate, but compellingly low-priced and thus a potential competitor to the XO-1.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

» Lessons learned: Two weeks with the XO laptop | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

OLPC XO-1, ASUS Eee PC, Intel Classmate: it’s all good. If Nicholas Negroponte has revitalized the laptop computer business, how beautiful is that?

Let’s get them all out to those educationally bereft parts of the world that need them so desperately, soonest!

As a veteran teacher once exclaimed (unfortunately, after 30 years or so the context is a mystery to me), “May the best educational experience win!”

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

My son, an education professional, pointed me toward an interesting review of the XO, the inexpensive laptop designed for use by children in the developing world.

As faithful reader will recall without prompting, One Laptop Per Child has been a frequent topic in this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere© over the past eight months.

Before we get to the inside-out analysis, let’s start with a review from Peter Glaskowsky’s technology review blog at CNET.com, a mainstream PC oriented site:

Unboxing OLPC’s XO-1 laptop

Posted by Peter Glaskowsky| December 29, 2007 2:05 PM PST

… If you get an XO-1, don’t throw away the box! You’ll need it for the free year of Internet access through T-Mobile WiFi hot spots. The box has the reference number for account activation.

In keeping with the low-cost nature of the XO-1, its packaging is minimal but adequate.

The OLPC XO-1 comes with only a few sheets of basic “Getting Started” documentation. Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

The XO-1 comes with no manual, just two sheets of paper: one showing the hardware and software features of the unit plus some warning icons, and one with a thank-you note from OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte….

Open, the XO-1 shows its most distinctive feature: the antenna “ears”. (Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

The XO-1′s ears contain 2.4 GHz antennas shared between the WiFi and proprietary mesh networks. They’re also the locks that hold the machine closed. They engage with spring-loaded pins so the top will snap closed even if the ears are stowed first.

Glaskowsky is critical of the keyboard (lighten up, it was designed for children, after all) and battery life, but is generally impressed.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Unboxing OLPC’s XO-1 laptop | Speeds and feeds – Technology analysis by Peter N. Glaskowsky – CNET Blogs

The next reviewer, bunnie at bunnie’s blog, literally took the XO apart, and has some fascinating insights into its innovative technology.

bunnie’s blog: OLPC XO-1

… We like hardware, and the OLPC XO-1 is an interesting piece of hardware. There are plenty of teardowns for the OLPC XO-1 (including one on the OLPC wiki itself), so I won’t repeat the tedium of what screw comes out of where and just cut to what I thought were interesting highlights.

If I were to make one general comment about the OLPC XO-1, it’s that its mechanical design is brilliant. It’s a fairly clean-sheet redesign of traditional notebook PC mechanics around the goal of survivability, serviceability, and robustness (then again, I’ve never taken apart any of the ruggedized notebooks out there). When closed up for “travel”, all the ports are covered, and the cooling system is extremely simple so it should survive in dusty and dirty environments. Significantly, the port coverings aren’t done with rubberized end caps that you can lose or forget to put on–they are done using the wifi antennae, and the basic design causes the user to swivel them back to cover the ports when they are packing up the laptop to go. That’s thoughtful design.

The full review is rather esoteric (and yr (justifiably) humble svt can be as much a geek as anyone, but these Linux guys are a breed apart!), but there are some interesting photographs of the components…

Here’s a photo of the motherboard with the heat spreader on:

And here’s a hi-res photo of it with the heat spreader off (click on the image to access the hi-res version):

Notice how both of the large BGA chips are underfilled to provide better shock and vibration robustness. I actually have never seen an underfill like this before–it seems to be oozing out of the edges–and it also doesn’t seem to be very uniform (some spots seem to have a little underfill missing). Most underfills I’m familiar with to attempt to cover every gap and void underneath a chip (which is actually a very hard process problem); maybe this is some new kind of underfilling technique that expands a little bit upon cure to help cover voids and its robust to a few missing spots. If a reader is familiar with this type of underfill technique, I’d appreciate a link to it.

… and useful observations regarding the suitability of the design for its intended application: education of developing world children aged 6-12.

And the extensive comments to the blog at the end add a great deal more information.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

bunnie’s blog » Blog Archive » OLPC XO-1

There is no doubt that OLPC XO-1 is a technological tour de force. Nicholas Negroponte’s designers and manufacturers made thoughtful and innovative choices that enhanced both the hardiness and the daily practicality of the hardware for its intended use in the developing world.

One example: the brightness of the backlight as seen in bunnie’s photo, in the context of the comparatively lengthy life of the XO’s battery charge that is not yet fully to its design target, is remarkable.

The early report from Peru we published recently certainly was a positive endorsement of this innovative program in the field.

Now, we can hope that the early successes will have two outcomes.

1. Persuade wait-and-see developing nations to revolutionize their children’s education by acquiring these world-changing devices.
2. The novel designs and technologies developed for XO is adopted by the industry at large so that all PC users can benefit.

Okay, mainstream business laptop manufacturers, how soon can you make us a useful business PC that will run coast to coast plus terminal waiting time on a single charge? The pieces of that puzzle seem to be in place.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!